Closing the Middle East’s Education Deficit

According to the UN, ongoing conflicts in the Middle East and North Africa are depriving more than 13 million children of an education, while the youth unemployment rate is the highest in the world. Governments and international institutions need to recognize that the problem is no longer a mere "development" issue.

NILE DELTA – About 60 miles north of Cairo’s Tahrir Square – the epicenter of the Egyptian uprising in 2011 – there is a secondary school students call “the prison.” A deformed box of concrete packed with dilapidated classrooms, the school is pockmarked with age and neglect. One teacher in the sleepy Nile Delta village morbidly quips that it doubles as a morgue. “We never saw a revolution here,” he said a few months ago, withholding his name for fear of losing his job. “A lot of the hope we had is now dead…it was killed.”

The plight of Egypt’s public schools is a critical indicator of how Egypt’s revolution has failed its people. Outside observers saw the popular rebellion against Hosni Mubarak’s regime as a struggle for democracy over dictatorship; the generals who once again rule Egypt portray it as a fight for secularism that was hijacked by radical Islam. In fact, it was a revolt for human dignity, for a better life for ordinary citizens.

Without education, that hope is stillborn, not only in Egypt but across the Middle East. According to the United Nations, ongoing conflicts in the Middle East and North Africa are depriving more than 13 million children of an education. But it’s not just in war-torn Syria and Yemen where youth are systematically neglected; shortcomings abound in relatively stable countries such as Egypt and Jordan.

Anne-Marie Slaughter, a former director of policy planning in the US State Department (2009-2011), is President and CEO of the think tank New America, Professor Emerita of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University, and the author of Unfinished Business: Women Men Work Family.

Military aid is really nothing of the sort. It gets paid back in other ways. Normally in criminally lucrative contracts for American firms. i.e. the US taxpayer effectively pays for these contracts.

Education aid has no financial round-trip so it is effectively a donation. The eternal middle east chaos is a major reason why America spends so much on Arms. Why help educate them when it will kill American jobs, profits, industries? Forget Realpolitik - this is Realökonomie at work.

Brilliant! Thank you for an adult conversation about the state of Egypt (and by extension, the Arab world) instead of the barely-concealed racism and Islamophobia that we sometimes see in certain media outlets.

You've nailed the point completely -- we're either going to have a universal (and high) education standard, or we're going to have decades of growing terrorism.

As wonderful as philanthropists like Bill and Melinda Gates, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum and The Clinton Foundation (among others) philanthropy alone will not solve the funding problem.

It's in the best interests of the developed world as much as it's in the best interests of the developing world to *generously fund education now* vs. the 1000 times higher costs that are associated with a lack of education in the youth native to the region, such as incarceration costs, victim costs and damaged infrastructure and the cost of living in a indefinitely wounded society.

What we need is education funding for Egypt and the wider region that is orders of magnitude greater than present.
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Here is a plug for Gordon Brown's excellent Project Syndicate essay on the general topic:

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